Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2023: A Look to the Future, Rooted in the Present
Posted by: Tristan Morris
Every year, cybersecurity companies collectively spend countless hours preparing content for Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CAM), a joint effort between the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA). Since this has been a tradition since 2004, we’re all familiar with the general themes: choose good passwords, keep your apps up to date, don’t hand out personal information online, and other simple security guidance. Those are great tips, but they’ve never really felt fully relevant to organizations that already know the basics and are focused on much larger problems. In the end, CAM is really designed for the average citizen, not for the industry professionals working in the field every day.
So this year, instead of waiting for CISA and NCA to release their annual theme, we decided to create our own that’s more focused on the issues that our industry is facing. So without further ado, let’s talk about GuidePoint Security’s plans for this month:
Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2023: A Voyage Beyond the Horizon
The last few years have seen incredible advancements in tech. Machine learning and AI took massive leaps forward with the release of easily accessible Large Language Models (LLM) and image-generation tools. Quantum computing took tangible steps towards reality. A rumored but disproven superconductor captured the public’s attention and created a wave of interest in the future a true superconductor could bring. With all this incredible change happening both inside and outside our field of practice, many organizations and professionals found themselves scrambling to change policies and implement new tools to counteract new threats that were popping up almost daily.
For CAM 2023, we reached out to experts–both here at GuidePoint Security and outside our organization–to talk about the issues they think will have the most impact on the future of cybersecurity, and how we can start facing them today. We spoke with experts about how AI and LLMs could make trusted communication more difficult, how unregulated and centralized personal data collection could become a massive liability for companies, how the cybersecurity skills gap could continue to grow at exponential rates, and so much more. In all our conversations, we found a common thread: if these problems aren’t handled properly now, companies and our industry as a whole will simply be creating bigger headaches down the line.
As we go through the month, we’ll be posting those conversations. Some will be blogs written by the experts, paired with speculative short stories about how some of these problems could impact our world in 100 years or more. Other conversations you’ll get to directly watch as videos and webinars, and we’ll even have expert guests on our weekly GPS Live show to discuss what they’ve been seeing in their fields and how they think we should be handling it.
Additionally, as a way to foster the next generation of cybersecurity professionals, we’ve partnered with Curtiss Brazell, author and Managing Security Consultant at GuidePoint, to donate sets of his books “B is for Blue Team” and “R is for Red Team” to organizations that you choose.
To learn more about what we’re doing throughout the month of October–and to sign up to have Curtis’ books sent to an organization of your choice–you can head to our dedicated CAM site and explore all the great content we’ll be posting, content we’ve already published, and more. And be sure to check out our LinkedIn to get access to the special, weekly GPS Live shows that we’ll be airing with expert guest hosts.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month has always been more focused on how the average citizen goes about their day-to-day life and security, and not on the industry and professionals working in it. With A Voyage Beyond the Horizon, we hope to carve out a space to focus on the things impacting our industry, and make the month something you cannot just learn from, but enjoy.
We hope you’ll join us throughout the month.
Tristan Morris
Cybersecurity Solutions Marketer,
GuidePoint Security
Tristan Morris started his cybersecurity career in 2010 as a cryptologic linguist in the US Marine Corps, where he learned the fundamentals of security and threat hunting. At the end of his enlistment in 2015 he began using his skills, knowledge, and perspective to build training and education labs and CTF events by re-creating advanced attack lifecycles to construct realistic datasets for lab attendees to hone their skills. He has spoken at large security conferences and events from Black Hat to Singapore International Cyber Week.